Chinese students supporting Xi Jinping's tour of Manchester University in 2015. Credit: Richard Stonehouse/ WPA Pool/Getty
Since 1995, the number of Chinese students travelling to study full-time in Britain has increased 75 times over, from just 1,510 to 115,435. During the same period, domestic places rose a mere 50%, meaning that in just 25 years Chinese students have gone from a rounding error in universities’ balance sheets to their second largest source of funding, after taxpayer-funded loans.
In the last four years alone, the number of Chinese students studying in Britain has risen by 36%, more than three times the 11% rate of growth for domestic students.
This means that more Chinese students travelled to study in the UK last year than from the entirety of the Commonwealth or from the rest of the G7. Indeed, fewer full-time places on UK campuses went to young people from the East Midlands or Yorkshire and the Humber than from the People’s Republic of China. Among postgraduates, this concentration is starker: for every two and a half UK postgrads, there is now one Chinese postgraduate studying in Britain.
Given the financial dependence of universities on Chinese students, then, the increasingly menacing language coming from Beijing should worry vice-chancellors deeply, especially at a time when they face a Covid-related financial squeeze. Beijing has threatened “devastating consequences” in response to recent decisions on Huawei and Hong Kong. If those consequences are targeted at UK university campuses, as is happening increasingly in Australia, they will have profound consequences for this country’s students, taxpayers and competitiveness.
With rising tensions over Hong Kong, it is no coincidence that the Chinese Ambassador, Liu Xiaoming, chose this month to remind Chinese students in Britain of their national duty. “Leverage your strength to extend the reach of China’s stories”, he told them, “serve your motherland”. Amid deterioriating relations with the West, he was sending a message that Beijing sees students not as free consumers of education exports but as propagandists and geopolitical pawns.
If China instructs its students to boycott Britain, it is almost certain that several institutions would fall over. New Onward research estimates that up to 16 universities rely on Chinese students for more than a fifth of their total fee income. The list includes many of the most prestigious and research-intensive institutions, including University College London, Imperial, Sheffield and Manchester, many of whom are already over-extended with debt and facing lower student flows due to the pandemic.
Because of the way overseas students cross-subsidise research, a fall-off in Chinese demand would also severely undermine UK science. Universities make an average surplus of £5,100 for every overseas student, of which £4,000 typically goes towards research. In total, overseas student fees contribute to a third of university research funding, meaning £1 in every £9 spent on university-led research in the UK relies on Chinese student income.
A further risk relates not to people but to influence. Unlike the United States, the UK has no formal controls on the foreign state funding of scientific research. In recent months, Jesus College Cambridge, Imperial College London and the London School of Economics have faced criticism after Freedom of Information requests revealed they had accepted funding from Huawei. But the reality is that no one — not even universities themselves — knows how much research funding comes from the Chinese state or its subsidiaries. Programmes like the Thousand Talents Plan, for example, are highly secretive.
If it seems extraordinary how much of this country’s research base depends on beneficence in Beijing, it is even more striking how few people recognised this as a strategic risk before the pandemic. In recent decades, the overwhelming consensus has been that higher levels of overseas students, especially from a growing Chinese middle class, are an unalloyed good that brings talent and money to Britain’s centres of learning. Politicians have gone out of their way to boost the concentration of students from China; Xi Jinping even began his 2015 state visit with a tour of Manchester University at the personal request of George Osborne.
The risks of overreliance on a single market — let alone an authoritarian country whose interests are diverging from our own — has never been debated. When I raised concerns about China’s dominance of student places in January, several liberal Twitter users scoffed. “Germany exports physical capital to China in the form of machine tools”, I was told, “the UK exports human capital in the form of education.” But universities are cultural and scientific institutions, not factories, and the collateral damage from a Chinese boycott of British universities would be far worse than similar action against German industrial machinery.
University places are also unlike other products because some institutions artificially constrain their supply, displacing lower-paying UK students. Oxford and Cambridge, for example, cap their student numbers, meaning there has been a decline in the number of state school pupils winning places in the last 20 years while the number of international students has sharply risen. Between 2014/15 and 2018/19, the number of UK students fell at Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, UCL, LSE, Bath and Manchester, and flatlined at KCL and Durham. Even if overseas students have subsidised domestic growth in aggregate, at the best institutions it seems to have crowded them out.
This is a debate the UK needs to have without delay. In the last six months, the Chinese state has issued escalating threats of a student boycott of Australia in response to security laws and trade tensions, culminating in June with the Chinese Ministry for Education telling students to “exercise caution” before choosing to study there. Australian universities will lose an estimated £6.5 billion over the next two years if the warning is heeded. Chinese mainlanders are already banned from studying in Taiwan.
These moves have already prompted Canada to start diversifying their overseas student intake. The UK should urgently do the same. One simple way to do this, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, would be to cap the number of students from any one country attending any single institution. This may be hard for some institutions in the short term, but in the long-run would have two virtuous effects: it would force universities to recruit more widely from overseas, diversifying the student body and improving resilience, and it could even spread the income from overseas students from the top universities down.
At the same time, ministers should make the expansion of overseas students contingent on growing the number of high-quality places for domestic students. We can hardly wonder why graduates feel dissatisfied with university, and gain ever less economic value from it, if the most prestigious courses and institutions are increasingly reserved for students from overseas.
Finally, universities should make much more transparent the funding that their academics receive from foreign bodies or governments. This is not in any way to say that international funding should be discouraged: research collaboration and exchange are essential to innovation. But we should accept that British taxpayers have a right to know — and to scrutinise — who is contributing to research at UK institutions, and what benefit they may be gleaning in terms of intellectual property, commercial partnerships or data.
The suspension of international travel from coronavirus has exposed the scale of universities’ reliance on overseas students. But the strategic risks existed before, and will persist long after, a vaccine has been developed. Politicians need to ask themselves a very simple question: are they comfortable with the fate of universities or the level of science funding being decided in Beijing rather than Westminster? If not, we must decouple and diversify.
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SubscribeI’ve long been astonished by the hostility shown by academia in the UK toward Israel while China gets a free pass: leading to the situation described here. Britain’s universities urgently need to be re-organised in order to serve the long-term interests and needs of this country; which would include abolishing lots of useless humanities courses.
Communist China is the last hope for the Left and the Far Left after the Soviet Union collapsed. Where are the Left/Far Left thoroughly ensconced? Universities. As to hatred towards Israel: it is far too “exclusionary” to the Left’s taste and it oppresses other nationalities. religions etc. It is also an economic success story without much Leftist involvement. Finally, it’s main enemy is the Left’s last hope for subverting the West and all it stands for. So maybe there’s no need to be astonished. I agree that British universities need to get back to their core mission which is local (even more so now that globalisation is in its death throes).
If they, the Chinese continue on their present bellicose path they will be annihilated by the USN and its splendid Ohio class ballistic submarines.
Will anyone shed a tear? I very much doubt it.
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I’d like to think that people would shed a tear if billions died. And China is no more bellicose than the US.
I hadn’t taken you for an agent provocateur for the CCP? You must know that is nonsense?
“One death is a tragedy, a million a statistic” as you know who is reputed to have said.
Since modern china isn’t really a communist state, this is nonsense. The country influencing modern leftist opinion in UK universities is the US.
Where do the US ‘left’ draw their inspiration from?
Our ‘Universities’ have become a national disgrace over the past twenty years, and thank you Mr Tanner for pointing the finger at the poisoned chalice, China.
So supine have they become, that accepting Chinese blood money is now completely acceptable behaviour. What on Earth happened to Ethics and Morality? Even Confucius would be shocked.
Major reform is essential, and hopefully the economic carnage produced by C-19 will be the catalyst. A “Dissolution of the Universities” is axiomatic to the future of this “precious stone set in the silver sea”or, if you prefer, “this England”.
Is there a politician with the courage?
We have naively treated China with utmost respect and even deference, in the hope that it alone would draw them away from authoritarianism and “into the light”. Each year that looks increasingly unlikely, and more likely that we have been taken advantage of.
The same has applied with universities, although I think they somewhat saw the Chinese state as a large cash machine.
We need to slowly and methodically detach from reliance on China across the board. Carefully and steadily diversify and move each and every structure and institution away.
The door should remain open (to a degree) for commerce, and most certainly for diplomacy, but it is clear that the only sensible route is insulation from the machinations of a state that is in almost every way incompatible with Western liberal democracy, and actively seeks to undermine it.
See events in Houston as an overt and ongoing example of this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/…
Our universities have been entirely corrupt for many years now. It is time to close most of them down. Actually, they are not worthy of the word ‘university’, as we have known for some time, existing as they do for no other purpose than to make money.
What shall we call them (the few survivors) instead?
“These moves have already prompted Canada to start diversifying their overseas student intake. The UK should urgently do the same.”
– Well, in the words of the Chinese proverb: “It’s later than you think.” It would be great to see some utterly useless universities go under, along with similarly pointless “social sciences” and humanities departments.
Sounds like an opportunity to cut the useless nasty courses and lecturers the studies brigade to start but the humanities that teach propaganda. I think Australia has done something like that.
Also I think Williamson said universities need to embrace free speech to be bailed out, he should also only stipulate the bail outs are for courses worth having.
Basically endorse what Fraser Bailey et al have said. Ive taught Chinese students Academic skills prior to university study and their standard of English is below the level needed to do a degree but the tutors get told to pass them because its worth 50000 £ or more in fees. I think the Unis need to accept a reduction in student nos -down to ten or 20 percent and improve standards.
Getting rid of mickey mouse degrees like gender studies and business might be a start!
I have long suspected that the rise in the number of foreign students is one of the reasons why it is so difficult for domestic students to get into top universities. When my daughter was applying for engineering, nearly every Russell Group and equivalent university required A*AA. I always wonder how many potential engineers this country lost simply because the entry requirement was so high.
Indeed, I work in a post-grad research dept, one that the Chinese government tries desperately to get students into, we already have the obligatory CCP minder in place within the staff, the Confucius institute and funding, but we also have some very hard-line academics and they won’t accept anyone who doesn’t come up to scratch. We take the top 1%, of the top 1% world wide to interview, not many Chinese make it that far, of the very few that do maybe 1 or 2 a year make it to starting courses. Other dept’s however are so bottom line focused 20-30% of every course is a Chinese student, with some it’s even higher, and even though they are supposed to have to meet a minimum standard in English those dept’s often have to employ interpreters for them.
This is just one of many reasons why the universities need a complete shake-up. If a crisis arising from the withdrawal of Chinese students precipitates this it will, in the long term, be well worth it.
While I strongly agree with this article and share the concern about the reliance of universities on Chinese funding, we should not forget that educating foreign students in Britain is one way, long term for sure, of extending British influence and values.
Only if those students are not already full invested and indoctrinated in their own countries activities and world-view.
University education has been needing transformation for some time.
1. The costs in some have outstripped the value created for graduates
2. Digital delivery and innovation can dramatically reshape how people learn
3. The pandemic has shown that digital education can work, and
4. The supply and demand has been shifting, such as described in this piece
Hopefully this set of catalysts leads to some consolidation, and elimination or overhaul of underperforming institutions
Leon Shivamber
You omit to mention the fact that many universities have also created educational outposts in China – notably in Wuhan (in fact three of the people repatriated to the UK back in January and quarantined at Arrowe Park Hospital on the Wirral were lecturers from Birmingham City University who had been visiting the university’s institution there). If the relationship with China continues to deteriorate, universities will no doubt also be mulling over the fate of their Far Eastern appendages.
There appear to be a number of triggers that have forced universities to take the action they have in courting the Chinese market, including the rapid loss of governmental income, the introduction of (inadequate?) student fees and, possibly, part of a general knee-jerk (fearful?) reaction to the increasing influence of China in the world, especially in Africa. There must be some intrinsic reason as to why China has been favoured over other countries.
In the city in which I live, the expansion of university places, both generally and more specifically to Chinese students, has been so great that the city centre is now dominated by newly built, high rise student accommodation which casts shadows over the streetscapes squashed within a small area (perhaps the city’s decision-makers didn’t foresee the consequences?). So the possibility of the loss of students from China, with the resultant financial loss, combined with the impact of Covid, will not only affect the city’s university per se, it will likely leave the city itself with several empty or half-empty buildings that are not suitable for the general population due to the way they have been internally configured. So the impact of welcoming students from abroad, notably from China, is much, much broader than the economic and educational considerations.
I taught conversational English to a Chinese woman in Perth Australia around 20 years ago. I asked her how on earth she had managed to get her university business degree in Perth with almost no English. She smiled and said she could read enough English to get through. It bothered me that her husband was a scientist employed by Perth CSIRO, and he spoke even less English. She told me that during China’s Cultural Revolution she was chosen as a leader, an example to others, and was given a special place in educational institutions. She loved Chairman Mao.
” the Prophet’s first followers can be seen as among the earliest versions of the socialist ideal.”
> The followers were involved with raiding caravans, murdering, plundering and enslaving. There is a chapter in the Quran called ‘Booty’ were Allah conveniently confirms Mohamed gets a 20% cut.
” Outside of more traditional family structures, Islamic socialism has also long been associated with the struggles of Muslims against the Russian Czars and British imperialism, “
> It was Arabic Muslim imperialist armies that developed the spread of Islam beyond Arabia, beginning with Abu Baker’s Ridda wars in Arabia, to bring back by force those who stopped allegiance to Mohamed’s movement after Mohamed died. I think you’ll find those in lands conquered by Muslim imperialist armies also rather struggled over their unwelcome appearance on the horizon.